Bushwick Cemetery Home To Spookiest Love Story Ever

BUSHWICK, BROOKLYN — Leave it to Bushwick to host one of the most morbid, yet tear-jerker love stories in Brooklyn history. In the middle of the 225-acre Evergreen Cemetery, there sits a small, gray mausoleum that used to house a man named Jonathan Reed. Reed was famous for his denial. After his wife, Mary, died, he chose not to believe she was dead until the day he himself died. The story goes that Reed built the mausoleum for his wife after she passed in 1893 and lived within it with her dead body and his pet parrot until he died, his arm reaching out desperately toward her coffin during his last breath.

Jonathan would speak with Mary all day and even brought a wood stove into the mausoleum, myth has it. He brought Mary's unfinished paintings and knittings to her. He became such a popular figure among religious and spiritual leaders that 7,000 people visited him in the mausoleum, and some even believed he had some supernatural power to talk to the dead.

You can visit the mausoleum yourself, where Jonathan and Mary are now both buried, at the Evergreen Cemetery, which is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily.

>>>Read the whole spooky, romantic tale at Bushwick Daily.

Lead photo by Sarah Kaufman/Patch